Chapter 9 – Juliette
NINE
JULIETTE
Detente
It happened, okay? My first real sexual experience. There was no point in making a big deal about it, because it wasn’t going to happen again.
With him, anyway.
No, it wasn’t going to happen again with him, but hopefully, I would have another sexual experience in my life, because damn. Orgasms. Am I right?
But it couldn’t happen again with him because eventually he was going to see the error of his evil ways, divorce me, sell this farm and give me everything except his stake and maybe a few thousand more for his labor over these past few months.
He did get the tractor working, plowed the fields, and now our seeds were planted.
I owed him something for that work, but that was it. Maybe a percentage of our yield.
In order to keep my head straight, I told myself what happened a few weeks ago was no big deal. That we would just keep going like we had been, and eventually, I’d stumble on the thing that would make him break.
In the meantime, life went on. Planting the crop was just the first step in a long line of steps until we harvested. Now we had to worry about all the obstacles that would show up between now and a couple of months from now.
The most worrying being some type of crop rot in the form of disease, insects or maggots.
To that end, we were in his truck, driving into town with lists in our hands.
“You hit the hardware store to pick up the insecticides. I’m going to stop by the post office.”
The hardware store. Shit. Kevin would probably be working and I had studiously avoided him for months now.
“You can do the hardware store. I’ll take the grocery store,” I said.
“We’ll both do the grocery store. I’m tired of you purposefully picking out all the brands I don’t like.”
“I pick what’s on sale,” I said.
Lies. I asked him for every brand name he liked and then I made sure to pick the opposite. Fucker was still eating Miracle Whip because that’s how I rolled.
He pulled up in front of the hardware store and I hesitated.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said, squirming in the passenger seat. Trying to see if I could see past the sales signs plastered on the storefront window into the store. Maybe it would be Kevin’s dad working the register today.
“Who are you looking for?”
“No one.”
He sighed and stretched out his arm along the back of the bench seat. “You know, it occurs to me, I never did ask about your situation.”
I glared at him. “What situation?”
I knew what he was asking, but it was just one more reason to get pissed all over again. No, he hadn’t asked anything about me before he agreed to Herb’s offer. Didn’t ask me if I had a beau or if I actually wanted to saddle myself with a husband at twenty years of age.
“If there was a guy in this town who was interested in you, he would have heard about the auction. He could have stepped up. He didn’t. So anything that happened before me is water under the bridge.”
“Can you hear yourself right now, Conan the Barbarian? If someone was interested in me, then maybe they were freaked the fuck out by the fact that my father was selling me to the highest bidder and they lost interest in me.”
His face gave nothing away. “Results are still the same. You’re m-”
“If the word mine or my wife comes out of your mouth right now, I swear I’ll dick punch you.”
“Jules, it’s getting to be about that time where you start to soften up. You need me to make you come again yet?”
I squished up my face. “Don’t say that.”
I knew I was probably turning red, too. That’s what happened when you’d been sheltered your entire life from anything even remotely sexual, only to have some dude show up who has zero filters.
He chuckled darkly and it made me scowl even more.
“There’s a kid in there I’ve seen a few times,” Creed said. I’m sure Kevin was the kid he was referring to. “Always gets a funny look on his face when he sees me. Was it him? I know you didn’t fuck him, but maybe you were…”
“He took me on a date,” I admitted, because that’s right. I had dated before Creed. “Well, not really a date. It was just coffee at Ruby’s diner. Still, it was a start, and then everything got ruined. You, being the ruiner.”
“That kid still has pimples on his face,” Creed pointed out.
“So! Look at your face. Besides, he’s twenty, my age. Not some old cradle robber like you are.”
“Cradle robbing is stretching it.” He leaned toward me then, his eyes pinned on the same storefront window mine were. “You still think about him?” he asked, softly.
The lie was there. Like all the other lies I’ve told him. But I just didn’t see the point. Kevin was no threat to Creed and Creed knew it.
I shook my head. “It’s not that. It was just one date. But…everybody thinks we were writing letters the whole time, which means he thinks that, too. The fact that I went out on a date with him while I was supposed to be mooning over you, sort of makes me a cheater.”
“Ah. I get it. You’re ashamed.”
“Not ashamed,” I corrected him. “I didn’t do anything wrong because were weren’t writing letters. I just hate the idea of someone thinking I would do that. I’m not a cheater.”
“No, just a liar and a saboteur.”
I shrugged. He wasn’t wrong.
“I’ll go in with you,” he offered. “We’ll pick up our shit here first, then hit the grocery store. I’ll stop at the post office before we leave town.”
I sighed. That meant we would have to double back, because the grocery was on the other side of town and the post office was just across the street.
“No, I can do it. I have to face him at some point. Might as well be today.”
Creed reached over me and pulled on the door handle to pop the door. His forearm intentionally, because I knew how he rolled, too, grazed my boob.
“If he offers to sweep you up and take you away from this place, just remember, I’ll come after you.”
I raised my eyebrows, asking the silent question, was he actually starting to like me?
“I need you to show me how to harvest the beets,” he finally said.
“It’s like you’ve spent your whole life reading romance books,” I told him.
He smiled and his ugly face looked almost more twisted when he did.
Hopping out of the truck, I slammed the door a bit too hard just for good measure and made my way inside the hardware store. I grabbed a cart because the pesticides we needed came in twenty pound bags.
And because I was here, and at any given time could use a thousand different tools for the farm, tools Creed wasn’t opposed to buying, I decided to browse the aisles one at a time.
Herb’s life motto was to make do with what you had.
But Creed thought more like I did, that efficiency in effort would ultimately make the farm more profitable.
We were already talking about how many more hands we might need for harvesting.
Herb typically brought on one extra set of hands and then worked him for sixteen hour days.
Creed would be able to do more than Herb had these past few harvests, but I was thinking with two extra hands we could do the work faster.
The trick with sugar beets was that you wanted them picked right after a frost to really crystalize the sucrose inside of them, making it easier for the sugar factories to extract the product. With two hands, we could get more of them out of the ground faster and under the best conditions.
I was weighing the pros and cons in my head when I realized I wasn’t alone in the gardening aisle. Lifting my head, I saw Kevin standing at the end of the aisle.
“Hey, Juliette,” he said, with a chin nod.
“Hi, Kevin. I was just browsing,” I said. “But I came in for pesticide.”
“Aisle Six.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Right. Sure you do. Just…you haven’t been here in a while.”
“Busy at the farm,” I said, putting the shears I didn’t need back on the shelf.
“Your husband sure comes in a lot.”
His emphasis on the word husband was not lost on me.
What the hell was I supposed to say to that?
There was no point in telling him the truth.
Not when I was the one to perpetuate the story in the first place.
I did it because I didn’t want the town to pity the poor girl with the monster father who would auction her.
So I made up a story like Creed and I were always meant to be.
But that, of course, made me dishonest in Kevin’s eyes and he wasn’t wrong.
Although what Creed said had been true, too. If I’d meant something to Kevin, he could have stepped up and at least talked to my father.
I could say this, though. “I didn’t know it was all going to happen so fast. I didn’t know Creed was coming to Riverbend. If I had…”
“Oh. Sure. Yeah, I get that. It’s all cool. I’m with April Talley now.”
April was Mrs. Talley’s youngest.
She was everything…that I wasn’t. Tall and beautiful. Everyone in town loved her. She had these amazing parents who loved each other and loved her. Two older brothers who doted on her like she was a princess. And as far as appearances went, the world was hers on a silver platter.
I knew she was a senior in high school. And apparently, she was dating Kevin.
Cool. Very cool.
I wasn’t jealous at all. Why would I be? I had my own man. Sure, he might sleepwalk with a gun in his hand and have all the romance of a porcupine when propositioning me for sex, but at least he was butt ugly.
“That’s awesome. I hear she’s really sweet. I’m just going to pick up the pesticide now.”
I pushed my cart past him, found the brand I was looking for, picked up the bags and then let Kevin ring me up. When I got back to the truck, Creed was waiting there to lift the two bags into the truck bed.
At least he was good for some things.
“Any problems?” he asked me.
I shook my head. “Nope.”
I got in the truck and he got behind the wheel. I noticed when he pulled himself into the truck, he had an envelope stuffed in his back pocket.
“You got actual mail?” I asked him.
“Don’t sound so surprised,” he muttered.
“Uh, dude. I live with you, remember? You have no family you speak to, no friends you text or call or who call or text you. You are…what they refer to in the biz as a lone wolf. So yeah, I’m surprised someone sent you something.”
“Oh, and you and your girlfriends are constantly on your group chat gossiping away.”
He was being facetious. There was no group chat, obviously. One had to have a phone for that. Besides, it was hard to make friends when you lived on a farm and were homeschooled your whole life.
It’s why I’d only heard about April Talley being sweet. I didn’t actually know her.
Herb preferred my isolation.
“You know what? You’re right. Herb’s dead. It’s time I stop living his version of my life. We should go to Ruby’s and get lunch. Be seen.”
“Seen,” he repeated.
“Yeah. We’re two people in this town. A fucking couple. Maybe there is a couple in Ruby’s we could chat up. Start having game night and shit.”
He looked at me like I was crazy.
“Do you not realize how messed up we are?” I asked him.
“Baby, that’s why we work,” he said. “Because we’re exactly this messed up.”
“I should have friends,” I muttered, as he started the truck. “Maybe if I’d had them, this wouldn’t have happened to me.”
He didn’t say anything after that because there was nothing to say.
But he did take me to Ruby’s after we finished our grocery shopping. He bought us two pieces of pie and two cups of coffee.
Ashley, a waitress with thick, dark hair and glasses, about my age, at one point smiled at us and asked us if we wanted refills.
It was nice.